CHICAGO, ILLINOIS.
Remarking on Jeremy Beer’s article on meritocracy, Patrick Deneen concludes with this grim, but correct, observation:
This, in a microcosm, is a central paradox of our political system: our cosmopolite meritocrats theoretically admire localism but abhor the idea…

The idealism of the paleoconservative cause is simply too burdened by the idealism of its vision. Politics is not a time machine and we are not ever going to travel back to whichever pre-modern, small government existence that many paleos…

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS.
Mark Thompson has penned a challenging broadside against skeptics of free trade, including me, and he makes a number of arguments that deserve to be answered. There does not seem to me to be much to the argument…

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS.
I appreciated Professor Deneen’s discussion of the problem of free-riding, and I agree that ours is a precarious position, but I would suggest that it is also paradoxically the strongest position available inasmuch as we are always trying…

E.D. Kain identifies a paradox in modern American conservatism that will be familiar to students of George Grant. Forty years ago, Grant wrote this in his essay, “In Defence of North America”:
It may be inded that, like most of…

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS.
Via Derbyshire, this Terry Teachout column makes an important observation that relates back to Derbyshire’s criticism of the influence of talk radio and my post on community:
The information age offers something for anybody: Survivor for simpletons, The Sopranos…

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS.
E.D. Kain had a fine quote from Wendell Berry that provides a good definition of community to start any discussion of place and limits:
A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared,…